Today in TV History: Lisa Simpson Was A Pioneer in the Fight to Modernize Barbie … Er, Malibu Stacy

Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Well, for one thing, it’s important because it’s an episode in the fifth season of The Simpsons, and literally every episode in the fifth season of The Simpsons is fantastic. There didn’t have to be any kind of special hook; they were all just great.

In “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy,” we got a very familiar version of Lisa: politically conscious, idealistic, and unafraid to buck the system. She was the perfect character through which to deal with something like Barbie. As we’ve seen in the news lately, Barbie is a massive cultural figure who hasn’t been particularly been good for the culture and the ways in which girls are conditioned through popular culture. In The Simpsons, Barbie is Malibu Stacy, and when Lisa buys a brand-new talking Malibu Stacy doll, she’s appalled that the only things she says are vapid, image-obsessed, and sexist.

Lisa predictably, and awesomely, goes on the offensive, taking her complaints all the way to the real-life Malibu Stacy (Kathleen Turner), who, in a fantastic twist, is an embittered businesswoman who’s been burned by the industry she helped build.

The episode is just another reminder of the kind of progressive female character that audiences were getting with Lisa, whose political action was sometimes the butt of a joke (she made the family march in that gay rights parade!) but was almost always laudable, even if she didn’t succeed.

The episode also features perhaps my all-time favorite Krusty the Clown bit: